January 2009

13 things I learned from books

Posted on by Patrick

But which books? See if you can guess… (Hint: They’re most­ly SF.)

  1. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door sales­men, and no one knows why.
  2. Forc­ing grunts to swear at their supe­ri­or offi­cers is a stu­pid way to build morale.
  3. If every­thing is infi­nite­ly improb­a­ble, then every­thing is equal­ly probable.
  4. If the Fast Burn is itself tran­scen­dent, and unhap­py with the direc­tion of the channedring, it may attempt to hide the jumpoff birthinghel. Also: Hexa­po­dia is the key insight.
  5. Grey-green alien skin requires a lot of soap.
  6. Even miss­ing the index and mid­dle fin­gers of his right hand, Roland is a hell of a shot.
  7. Give praise to the day at evening, to a blade when tried, and to ice when over it.
  8. “Anath­e­ma” looks like a girl’s name if you’ve nev­er read a dictionary.
  9. If your full name has twelve words in it, most peo­ple will for­give you if you go by “Phaethon”.
  10. If your full name is “Hiro Pro­tag­o­nist”, you can bet your par­ents had some kind of weird relationship.
  11. One does not out­run a sub­stance that explodes at 15,000 feet per sec­ond. Also, if you’re count­ing on the police to save you, best not to antag­o­nize them while you’re sit­ting on a bomb.
  12. “Chuck” and “toss” are per­fect­ly valid instruc­tions in a cookbook.
  13. No mat­ter how inter­est­ing the many-uni­vers­es-bridged-by-jump-gates premise may be, I can only read a book with that many near-rape scenes once. And it was a rough slog at that.

These are all off the top of my head, by the way. And yes, some are repeats.

Millions just fell from the sky

Posted on by Patrick

The now-defunct site ficlets.com had a fea­ture called “Inspi­ra­tion”, which would offer you an open­ing line, an end­ing line, and a smat­ter­ing of CC-licensed pic­tures from Flickr to try and give you some­thing to write about. One time the end­ing line I got was “…mil­lions just fell from the sky”, and here’s what resulted:

Take a per­fect sphere of some ide­al­ized mate­r­i­al, col­ored black, and heat it up. It’ll start to radi­ate in the infrared, heat. Add more ener­gy to it, and even­tu­al­ly it’ll glow in col­ors you can see: dull red first, then orange, yel­low. Heat it long enough and it’ll glow bril­liant blue, like the hottest and youngest stars there are.

That’s how stars work, in the­o­ry. In prin­ci­ple gas­es and dust and maybe inter­stel­lar inva­sion fleets get in the way, block­ing cer­tain lines as they absorb spe­cif­ic spec­tra of light.

But this isn’t an astron­o­my les­son, this is a fable. About how my father died, and yours too, prob­a­bly. There aren’t many of us left since Wish­ing Day.

The mag­ic drag­on woke in his cave at the moun­tain’s sum­mit, and saw X, the man who’d climbed near­ly into space just to make his wish.

“I wish,” X said, not real­ly think­ing it through, “that sun­light was diamonds.”

Ten tril­lion dia­monds flew out into space, most of them miss­ing Earth by hun­dreds or mil­lions of miles.

Mil­lions just fell from the sky.

Wait, what?

Posted on by Patrick


“Grand Design” Spi­ral Galaxy M81
From TopTechWriter.US’s Flickr photostream.

Via a cow-ork­er: Our world* may be a giant holo­gram.

“…[Y]ou can think of the uni­verse as a sphere whose out­er sur­face is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each con­tain­ing one bit of information.”

Well, maybe you can. I can’t. Not yet, anyways.

____

* If by “world” we mean “Uni­verse”.

On my to-be-read pile

Posted on by Patrick

It just keeps grow­ing like a hydra. Here are the lat­est three books:

New books

Not pic­tured: The last Bar­ti­maeus nov­el; Rain­bows End by Vinge; a graph­ic nov­el about Louis Riel; an epic poem; The Bears’ Famous Inva­sion of Sici­ly; and a bunch I can’t even remem­ber right now.